InfoGuides: Digital Humanities and Social Sciences: Data Visualization

Last Updated: Feb 27, 2024 12:48 PM

What is Data Visualization?

Data Visualization is using graphics and images to illustrate relationships within data that might not be otherwise obvious. Bar charts, pie graphs, tables, and infographics are all examples of data visualization.

What can you do with data visualization?

Data visualization is used to explain the relationship within data. Good data visualization tells a compelling story that is firmly grounded on facts, because the story was constructed from patterns in the data, and not the other way around. Specific examples include:

Analyze the change in mortgage prices in the United States since the financial crisis of 2008
Demonstrate the most popular baby names in the world from the 21st Century
Analyze the use of active vs. passive verbs in novels
Visualize peak hours of students utilizing the library
Show the trend of pharmaceutical prices in the United States vs. other countries
Visualize the flow of students attending class at RIT

Tableau

What is Tableau?

Tableau is a data visualization platform that allows users to create a wide variety of visualizations with little data manipulation and few technical skills required. Users can create single graphs, dashboards with multiple elements, or slideshows that highlight snapshots of data.

Tableau Desktop is proprietary and requires a paid license to use. Tableau Public is a free alternative, but can only export to Tableau Public Online, on which all of your visualizations and underlying data will be available to anyone on the internet. This video will show you the basics of Tableau.

Common Tools

Getting Started

Data Visualization

Learning Data Visualization (LinkedIn Learning)

Infographics

Learning Infographic Design (LinkedIn Learning)

Excel

Google Sheets

R (programming language)